We all take one last look before walking away. This was true for me the night I was in Brisbane last. I had a morning left of being there ahead of me still, but already I was taking in everything around me the way I would a memory: each look a lingering one; feeling nostalgic for all that was for all that I knew they would soon become.

It had to do with a particular stall in Southbank and my making a memory locket of my time in Brisbane. Four years I had spent dreaming up my last trip, making it up in my mind as one to be remembered. But the moment I came to the end of it, I found myself there, an empty locket in one hand and a selection of charms displayed on the table before me, feeling hesitant. Each charm I turned over in my hand, I did so while thinking deeply of what they would mean in the making of my memory locket - what story they would tell; what story did I want them to? Because in all my dreaming of what the perfect last trip would look like, I hadn’t spared a moment to think of what the last four years I had already spent in Brisbane was like to me. What, at the end of the entirety of my time in Brisbane, did I want to remember?

And it’s funny because the truth is that there has always been a goodbye saved in me for Brisbane. That when I think of the times I was there, I think of my constant want to have been back in Brunei instead; I think of my looking forward to the end of them. To this - almost down to the very moment.

But this is what it’s like to take one last look before you walk away.

In that last look - that sweeping glance, the gaze that lingers - everything becomes a part of a memory you would one day come back to. Everything that, in its finality, you would want to make count.

And at a Southbank stall on my last night in Brisbane, this was a way I could make it count.

With the weight of the locket in my hands, and what was left of my last night in Brisbane yet awaiting me still, I finally found myself sparing a moment to think back to the last four years. To what it was I had remembered. To what it was that I then knew that I wanted to. And it all comes down to this: the dream I had pursued, the risk it had entailed; the falls I had taken; the growth that had come of it; the home I had left, the home I had found.

And when I finally walked away from the stall, carrying my memory locket with me, the flashes of four years’ worth of memories had left me feeling like I had had my fill of Brisbane. That I had made the most of my one last look at it.

But then again, here I am, two months later, writing this, thinking that in this way, I am finally ready for it to truly be my one last look at it all.